PUBLICAN QUALITY BREAD RECIPE

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PUBLICAN QUALITY BREAD RECIPE

MEET PUBLICAN QUALITY BREAD

Each One Off Hospitality concept is fueled by the desire to use the highest quality and most responsibly sourced ingredients - produce, meat, you name it. In 2014, the One Off team brought on Greg Wade, an experienced and innovative baker who previously helmed Little Goat Bread. Collaborating with Executive Chef Paul Kahan and our Chefs de Cuisine across The Publican family of restaurants, Greg and the entire Publican Quality Bread team now have a dedicated place to explore how whole grains and thoughtful fermentation can yield ridiculously good bread. Greg and his team now oversee the bread program for all One Off Hospitality Group concepts, creating new breads that fit with each restaurant's distinct menu. Additionally, Publican Quality Bread has a burgeoning wholesale division that currently supplies to over 50 restaurants across Chicago.

STEP 1: GROW

STEP 1: GROW

Growing, Growing, Grain.

Growth and cultivation are vital to any experience, the human one included. For us, it’s as important to grow our grains as it is to grow our relationships and our community. Our bread wouldn’t be possible without Marty and Will Travis of Spence Farm in Fairbury, IL, a connection we’ve fostered over more than five years. Each year, we collaborate with Marty and Will on the grains we’d like to use, as well as growing conditions for the year and our collective quality standards.

We choose varieties of heritage wheat, not for yield or ease of harvest as conventional farmers do, but for flavor, baking quality and soil health. Our bread starts, quite literally, from the ground up. As the Travis family sows the seeds of grain, our connection to them extends to a larger community, bringing together our farmers, our team and our partners from restaurants and retail locations across the city. Bread has always been a catalyst for shared experience, and it’s our goal to share that mentality with the chefs, restaurateurs and guests we’re lucky to work alongside each day.

PHOTOS AT SPENCE

STEP 2: FERMENT

STEP 2: FERMENT

Our Process

The liveliness of the farm leads directly into our fermentation process. Marty and Will mill our grains every week, and their biodynamic techniques preserve the integrity of the grain without adding chemicals, pesticides or other processes.

Publican Quality Bread uses a long-fermentation process that encourages depth of flavor and ultimately makes our breads more nutritious. We produce the most wholesome products we can by sourcing ingredients locally, from people who have ethical practices. Honey is our go-to sweetener in lieu of refined sugar, and our refined flour is grown on transitional organic fields. Like most things in food, we believe that the best thing we can do is buy the highest-quality ingredients from people we care about, and let those ingredients speak for themselves.

STEP 3: BAKE

STEP 3: BAKE

Our Bakery

At Publican Quality Bread, we focus on naturally fermented, whole-grain breads. We bake our breads in a hearth oven and achieve a darker crust color because we believe more caramelization equals more flavor. We favor gentle mixing methods and fully hydrated doughs which require hand shaping. Because of this, each loaf of bread has its own characteristics, reflective of the ingredients and energy that characterize our process from start to finish.

SERVE, WARM

SERVE, WARM

On the Rise

Food production dominates land, water and fertilizer use and is a greenhouse gas source. In the United States, beef production is the main agricultural resource user overall, as well as per kcal or g of protein. Here, we offer a possible, non-unique, definition of ‘sustainable’ beef as that subsisting exclusively on grass and by-products, and quantify its expected US production as a function of pastureland use.

Unlikemost microbiomes, which contain up to thousands of species, fermented foods like sourdough, sauerkraut and kimchi have only a few to a couple of dozen species, making them easier to study. At the same time, they share commonalities with more complex microbiomes. For example,the microbiomeon cheese rinds is similar to that on your skin.

I’m supertired of superfoods. And it’s not just because I really don’t want to drink chaga tea. It’s because the game of finding some nutrient in some food and making wildly improbable assertions about the consequent effect on human health is a clicky gimmick by which unscrupulous marketers and audience-hungry media prey on credulous consumers.

It’s difficult to connect the dots throughout our complex food system. Although it is rarely demonstrated scientifically, we generally accept that what happens on farms impacts the quality of our food. For microbial foods, the raw materials we use in fermentation can introduce different microbes depending on how those materials were produced. A recent study in Italy of sourdough fermentation demonstrated that organic vs. conventional farming can affect the quality of sourdough bread. This exciting new research highlights the role that microbes play in shaping food quality as it moves along the path from farm to fork.

One of the biggest modern myths about agriculture is that organic farming is inherently sustainable. It can be, but it isn’t necessarily. After all, soil erosion from chemical-free tilled fields undermined the Roman Empire and other ancient societies around the world. Other agricultural myths hinder recognizing the potential to restore degraded soils to feed the world using fewer agrochemicals.